This book argues for a new anthropology of the moving image, bringing together an important range of essays on time-based media in the contemporary arts and anthropology.

It builds on recent attempts to develop more experimental formats and engages with debates on epistemologies of ethnography, relational aesthetics, materiality, sensory ethnography, and observational and participatory cinema. Arnd Schneider critically revisits Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum and the hyperreal, engages with new media theory, and elaborates on the potential of the Writing Culture critique for moving image practices bordering art and anthropology.

This important work will be essential reading for anybody working across the fields of visual anthropology, film and media studies and visual studies.

Table of contents:

1. Expanded Visions
2. Experimenting with Film, Art and Ethnography: Oppitz, Downey, Lockhart
3. Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation through Experimental Film
4. Stills that Move: Photofilm and Anthropology
5. On the Set of a Cinema Movie in a Mapuche Reservation
6. A Black Box for Participatory Cinema: Movie-making with ‘‘Neighbors’’ in Saladillo, Argentina
7. An Anthropology of Abandon: Art―Ethnography in the Films of Cyrill Lachauer
8. Can film restitute? Expanded Moving Image Visions for Museum Objects in the Times of Decolony

Reviews:

"This is the latest in the series of indispensable volumes that Arnd Schneider has edited (or co-edited) tracing developments in the field of art and anthropology, and here, in the growing affordances, beyond the influence of critical film theory or existing experiments in observational film, for absorbing more difficult contemporary work into the continuing signature commitment of anthropologists to ethnography. As ever, Schneider has been judicious and acute in his work, showing, rather than telling, the stakes of further venues of experiment in an already lively visual anthropology." - George E. Marcus, Director, Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine, USA.

"Expanded Visions is a new chapter in Arnd Schneider’s decades-long commitment to scrutinising the intersection of anthropology and the visual arts – gesturing towards the radical possibilities of experimentation in audiovisual research. It is an astute plea for multimodal and artistic inquiry. […] In short, it’s a welcome and eloquent contribution to research on the intersection of anthropology and the arts." - Sander Hölsgens, LSE Review of Books

Arnd Schneider is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and has published widely on contemporary art and anthropology. He is the Editor of Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters (2017) and Art, Anthropology and Contested Heritage (2020).